Spatialities and Networks of Cancer

Description

The Spatialities and Networks of Cancer research cluster, in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King's College London, examines historically and ethnographically practices that spatialise cancer. Working across the North and the South, its research pays particular attention to South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The cluster notes that medical mapping, often promoted by powerful actors, renders epidemics visible, tells stories about their origins, traces pathways of transmission and predicts potential future courses, and that underpinning these mapping practices are historically distinct socio-technical infrastructures and political rationalities as well as culturally specific understandings of disease and place. It describes its research agenda as showing how cancer is spatialised and what it spatialises, and a key aim is to examine networks that enable medical mapping and that are enabled by it.

As part of its own networking activities, the cluster launched the Political Stakes of Cancer Network to bring together early career researchers with an interest in the social study of cancer. Its members take part in a monthly reading group, running since October 2020, on texts from critical global health, medical anthropology, history and philosophy of medicine, and science and technology studies; two of its project teams hold Cancer Conversations, meetings with anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and historians who work on cancer, and the cluster organises writing workshops for its members. Projects assembled in the cluster include Cartographies of Cancer (epidemiologists and malignancies in sub-Saharan Africa), Grid Oncology (remaking cancer care in India) and Surveillance, Scale and the Mapping of Public Health in Colonial India, and it acknowledges funding from the Wellcome Trust for individual projects assembled in it.

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King's College London (KCL)
London